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Half a century ago, Belgian Zoologist Bernard Heuvelmans first codified cryptozoology in his book On the Track of Unknown Animals.

The Centre for Fortean Zoology (CFZ) are still on the track, and have been since 1992. But as if chasing unknown animals wasn't enough, we are involved in education, conservation, and good old-fashioned natural history! We already have three journals, the largest cryptozoological publishing house in the world, CFZtv, and the largest cryptozoological conference in the English-speaking world, but in January 2009 someone suggested that we started a daily online magazine! The CFZ bloggo is a collaborative effort by a coalition of members, friends, and supporters of the CFZ, and covers all the subjects with which we deal, with a smattering of music, high strangeness and surreal humour to make up the mix.

It is edited by CFZ Director Jon Downes, and subbed by the lovely Lizzy Bitakara'mire (formerly Clancy), scourge of improper syntax. The daily newsblog is edited by Corinna Downes, head administratrix of the CFZ, and the indexing is done by Lee Canty and Kathy Imbriani. There is regular news from the CFZ Mystery Cat study group, and regular fortean bird news from 'The Watcher of the Skies'. Regular bloggers include Dr Karl Shuker, Dale Drinnon, Richard Muirhead and Richard Freeman.The CFZ bloggo is updated daily, and there's nothing quite like it anywhere else. Come and join us...

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Sunday, February 15, 2009

Townspeople in Belefanai, Liberia reported a noise like the sound of heavy rain cascading down through the leaves. It was caterpillar droppings. Millions upon millions of the creatures were writhing around in the trees. In early January, when the long, black caterpillars reached the creeks that serve as the main water sources for the town of Belefanai in north-central Liberia, the creatures' faeces instantly turned streams dark and undrinkable.

Moving through the forest canopy on webs, devouring the leaves as they went, the caterpillars advanced like nothing the townspeople had ever seen. They ate food and cash crops—coffee, cocoa, citrus, plantain, banana, and cassava. They took over homes and people fled. Venturing into the forest meant being hit by a wave of caterpillars that appeared to be moving forward about as fast as the average person walks.

"The worms would drop on you from all angles," said Moses M. Kolinmore, a mason who arrived in Belefanai just as townspeople realized they had to get word to the government. "They would cover the whole ground—thousands upon thousands of thick, strong, stubborn worms. It was fearful, very fearful."

The outbreak, which began in December in a remote, forested region of Guinea just over the border from Belefanai, has affected an estimated half million people in more than a hundred towns and villages, prompting the Liberian government to declare a state of emergency.

This week entomologists identified the insect as a moth with a name only scientists had heard before: Achaea catocaloides. Government officials and international experts are searching for a strategy to control the outbreak, which threatens to spread because first -generation Achaea caterpillars are dropping to the ground and turning into pupae, then moths.

The moths can fly long distances—up to 620 miles (1,000 kilometers) if the winds are right—and then lay eggs that will hatch into still more caterpillars. Each moth not killed will lay 500 to 1,000 eggs and start the cycle again. Johnson Nyelartah, a teacher in Belefanai, said townspeople are bracing for another worm invasion, "It is our fear that these butterflies will multiply into more than we had before," he said.

One cause for optimism: The caterpillars and moths are dry-season pests, and Liberia's dry season should last only another month or so, experts say. "We are hoping the rains will end the outbreak," said J. Qwelibo Subah, director general of Liberia's Central Agricultural Research Institute (CARI), who is coordinating the response to the infestation.

In the interim, the Ministry of Agriculture is scrambling for solutions.

Fifty-five field staff are scouting for concentrations of the caterpillars and moths, spraying them with pesticide from the ground and collecting and burning the pupae in their cocoons. Farmers have been setting slow-burning fires in leaf litter to smoke caterpillars out of trees and incinerate them. Because the caterpillar infests wide areas so rarely, scientists have not researched a way to safely and selectively kill large numbers of Achaea catocaloides.

If all other measures fail, Subah said, he would not rule out aerial spraying, even though UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) officials have advised against the technique, because it would kill many other species and further contaminate open water supplies. "We are considering all options," Subah said. No one is sure what turned Achaea catocaloides—one of the most common moths across central and West Africa—into a nightmarish plague in Liberia's forest.

It could have been the weather, experts say. During the dry season, a strong wind called the harmattan blows from the Sahara across West Africa. Perhaps in late 2008, this wind picked up Achaea catocaloides moths and then deposited a large concentration along the Guinea-Liberia border. Or perhaps there was an unnoticed local increase in Achaea catocaloides numbers and, when the temperature was right, the population exploded, said Gregory Tarplah, an entomologist with Liberia's Ministry of Agriculture.

Whatever happened, once the caterpillars emerged in great numbers they needed an expanded food supply. They turned from eating their favorite food, the Dahoma tree, to eating most any tree in their path. And they began to migrate in search of more.

A new study has suggested that strands discovered in fossil hyena poop found in a South African cave, could be the oldest known human hairs. Researchers discovered the rock-hard hyena dung near the Sterkfontein caves, where many early human ancestor fossils have been found.

Each coprolite, is roughly 0.8 inch (2 centimeters) across. They were found embedded in sediments 195,000 to 257,000 years old. The sizes and shapes of the coprolites and their location suggest they came from brown hyenas, which still live in the region's caves today.

Until now, the oldest known human hair was from a 9,000-year-old Chilean mummy.

It's not clear which species the newfound human hairs are from, since the human fossil record for this time span is exceedingly limited, the researchers say. But, the hairs' age covers just before when we think modern humans emerged, and overlaps with the existence and end of Homo heidelbergensis.

"The hairs could belong to either of them, or of course to a species not yet recognized," Said Lucinda Backwell, a paleoanthropologist at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. Backwell and her colleagues used tweezers to extract 40 fossilized hairs resembling glass needles from one of the hyena coprolites.

Scanning-electron-microscope images revealed wavy bands of scales on the hairs-a pattern typical of modern primates, with human hair being the closest match. Modern brown hyenas are known to hunt baboons and other large mammals when they are rearing cubs, according to the researchers. According to Backwell, the hairs in this particular coprolite did not yield any DNA. But, she noted that there seem to be hundreds of fossil droppings in the one South African cave alone and plenty more in sites across the region. "The contents of such dung could shed light on the ancient environments where early humans and their ancestors once lived," she said.

"It would be extremely interesting if this work kicked off some concerted effort to go back to sites where fossil dung has been found before," said Pat Shipman, a paleoanthropologist at Pennsylvania State University. "This could give us more evidence to answer questions being debated these days on how and when and where and why modern humans arose".

It sounds like a creation of J.R.R Tolkien, but a crocodile with horns and savage tusks has been uncovered by Paleontologist Paul Sereno who unveiled his find on Friday. Sereno calls it boar-croc and is yet to furnish it with a scientific name.

The University of Chicago researcher found the skull in the Sahara Desert, which many thousands of years ago was moist and supported all sorts of animals,including crocodiles. The age of the creature has not yet been revealed. There are also no details on size.

Boar-croc doesn't fit in any known order. It has a crocodile-like snout, but with horns and three sets of canine teeth like those of a wild pig adapted for eating meat, he explained.

In the Gahirmatha marine sanctuary, in Orissa, India, over 1000 Olive Ridley sea turtles have died, days ahead of the 'arribada'or mass egg laying. The the lined a kilometre-long stretch of the sandy beach and more bodies piled up with each passing day.

Official sources said around 1900 bodies were counted till but the total count may be over 5000. There were deep marks of injury on some of the bodies. It isunclear if these wounds were the cause of death, or if scavenging dogs had made them. Last year too, hundreds of turtles were found dead on the same spot - victims of illegal poaching by mechanised fishing trawlers.

Thousands of Olive Ridleys get killed along the Orissa coast every year by getting entangled in the nets of the trawlers that operate illegally in the prohibited zones when these endangered species congregate for mating.

The Olive Ridley (Lepidochelys olivacea), also known as the Pacific Ridley, is one of the smallest species of sea turtle. It is named for the olive-green color of its heart-shaped shell. It is usually found in the Indo-Pacific and Atlantic oceans.

Heather is our new rep for the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and was introduced to the folks of the bloggo brigade by Corinna last week. Here is her first outing as guest blogger...

It seems like not a month goes by without the media reporting that some extinct animal, maybe, could be, cloned at some point in the near future. Generally these stories are just fluff, but very few people know about the attempts in the 1920s and 30s to bring back the Aurochs*, a prehistoric Ox that most domestic cattle are derived from. This being the period between the wars the motivation was not so much conservation, but driven by a desire for something pure and strong, a kind of livestock equivalent of the Eugenics movement which was highly influential at the time, not only in Germany, but also the rest of Europe and America.

The man in charge of this experiment was Lutz Heck, director of the Berlin Zoo from 1932 to 1945. His memoirs 'Animals my Adventure' are an interesting read, in them he recounts his trips to Africa to collect animals, his attitudes to the Africans would make a modern reader uncomfortable, as he had none of the skill of Gerald Durrell in portraying natives as just as human as 'the rest of us'. His coverage of the war era and his involvement with the Nazi party are not really touched upon, but he does give us a vivid account of the Zoo suffering from an Allied air raid.

Heck's main interest, as a Zoologist was the Aurochs, he decided that by breeding together varieties of domestic cattle that had characteristics of this ancient beast he could recreate it. This project was begun in the 1920s, and carried on into the 30s with the approval of Hitler and Goering, who hoped that he would be able to create an Aryan theme park in eastern Prussia, where Germans could go and experience the life of the Aryans.

Ron Jonson goes into detail on this in his radio programme 'The Quest for the Aryan Cow' which has interviews with Heck's grand-daughter and includes a visit to the park in Munich where the descendants of Heck's cattle live on a island.

Despite their fearsome reputation and the awe in which they were held back in the 1930s, Jon Ronson is not that impressed by them. After all they are really just domestic cattle that are a facsimile for Aurochsen and not the genuine article. Maybe one day we will be able to clone one, but DNA extracting technology would have to be far better than today as the last aurochs died nearly four hundred years ago.

Were we to clone a thylacine or an Aurochs, we would just be recreating the genetic bottleneck that in part led to their extinction and we must think very carefully about how we go about cloning such things should it ever become scientifically viable.

*Pendantic Linguist’s Note. As Aurochs is derived from the German I have used the more germanic plural Aurochsen which aligns it with the English words Ox and Oxen.

This is going to be a monumentally stressful week for us all. We are in London (twice), Enfield (once) and Yeovil (once) and will be tootling up and down the motorway like there is no tomorrow. The daily bloggo postings will continue at approximately noon and 6 p.m, but it is very likely that the notification posts to Usenet and Facebook, and possibly even the changes to the CFZ website front page, may go by the board some days (most likely friday and sunday).

Please forgive us for this, but as you will find out when we tell you all about it, there is a lot at stake this week.....

At the CFZ we believe in helping those who help themselves, and so we have dug into the coffers and bought some new film editing software for Jordan Warner the director of Cryptid-Hunt an entirely self funded, and jolly smashing webTV show. He now has the same software that we use ourselves.

This is part of a new initiative to try and help people who are doing something groovy within the cryptozoological community. We will hopefully be sending a laptop to Ireland for our old friend Tony "Doc" Shiels in the next week or so as well. All this got me thinking. If there is anyone out there in bloggoland who is reading this who has software or equipment that they don't want let us know. We can quite possibly find a useful new home for it.

We are also stockpiling cryptobooks for those who either can not afford their own libraries, or live in parts of the world where such things are not as widely available as they are to us. So if you have any going to waste, or - indeed - if you are in a charity shop and you see copies of such things going cheaply, buy them, send them to us, and we will distribute them where they are most needed.....

The Centre for Fortean Zoology is taking a new initiative to foster interest in the natural world among young people. The Centre, which keeps a number of exotic animals, is giving away tropical fish and equipment to disadvantaged families.

Swordtails and Guppies from Mexico and Trinidad are beautiful and make ideal starter pets for kids interested in tropical fish. Colourful and relatively easy to keep and breed, they are being given to good homes with a pamphlet on their care and natural history.

In Britain, politically correct legislation created by non scientists is making it harder for exotic animals to be kept as pets. In contrast, the CFZ hopes to be a catalyst in terms of getting younger people interested in the world around them and this is part of our Outreach project.There is more to childhood than video games, vacuous music and Reality TV. Children are the nation’s future decision-makers and we need to harbour a love of animals in them today.

As regular readers will know the CFZ Archiving Project is well under way, and Oll Lewis is doing a sterling job scanning and uploading the voluminous CFZ collection of Press Cuttings. However in order for the archive to be a truly useful resource, it needs to be properly catalogued, and so we are looking for someone to do it for us.

Ideally, I think, we can once again utilise Blogspot, and start up a new blog which can function as an index to the Archiving Project. However, if anyone has better ideas please do get in touch with them.

It is time, once again, for all good men and women to come to the aid of the party, so please Mr, Mrs, or Miss Volunteer ---- Come on down!!!

Why is Oll wearing a hat indoors? Possibly because of his obsession with Indiana Jones, but possibly just for effect. Never mind. He has been jolly busy and the latest set of scanned news clippings and other stuff from the Archiving Project is ready for you to download should you want to..

Researchers in Germany have completed the first draft of the Neanderthal genome, 3 billion genetic building blocks that will shed new light on the ancient hominid as well as the origins of its closest relation — humans. The team teased enough DNA out of three 38,000-year-old bone fragments to isolate some 3 billion DNA base pairs. The Neanderthal genome contains roughly 3.2 billion pairs, but many of lead scientist Svante Paabo are repeats, meaning his draft is about 63 percent complete.

Just as humans and gorillas share a common evolutionary ancestry, the pubic lice that infuriate some members of the two species are also related. Pubic lice–known to scientists as Pthirus pubis and to most other people as “crabs”–are thought to have evolved from Pthirus gorillae, the structurally similar species that infests gorillas. Genetic analysis by David Reed at the University of Florida indicates that the lice lineages split about 3.3 million years ago, whereas it is believed that humans diverged from gorillas at least 7 million years ago. This suggests that “early humans somehow caught pubic lice from their gorilla cousins.”

On febuary the 11th a pack of 20 dholes or Indian hunting dogs, escaped from their enclosure at Howletts Zoon near Cantabury, Kent. 12 returned to their enclosure themselves. This is quite normal as escaped zoo anima;s, most of whome were captive born, become confused and scared in the wild and head back to were they feel secure. 5 more were tranqualized by vets, one died and two more are still at large. Dholes are not generally considered dangerous to humans though captive ones may have lost their fear of people.

Spokesperson Tricia Corkhill said it was unclear how they had escaped but everything was being done to catch them.She said: "The situation is under control and we have trained animal keepers and vets with tranquilliser guns looking for the missing dogs."They pose little or no danger to the public but they shouldn't be approached anymore than you would approach a fox or stray dog." They are captive-reared and used to the park so will want to get home."

Engineer Ben Towler, 27, was driving through Wingham on Wednesday morning when he almost ran over the sandy-haired one. "It looked like a big ginger wolf with a lion's mane – kind of like a fox on steroids," he said.

The wild dogs, were made famous as villains in Kipling’s timless classic The Jungle Books in the story Red Dog were they threthern Mowgli’s wolf pack. Mowgli defeats them with the aid of the giant python, Kaa. In the vacuous Disney verstion they are ommited and Kaa, a wise and noble creature in the books is turned into a nasal, whining villain.

The reasoning being that ‘The American public would not except a snake as a hero’.

NEIL ARNOLD WRITES: Jon, here are a couple of links regarding the recent escaped Dholes from Howlett's Zoo Park at Canterbury. please could you slip maybe a mention of this into the book ? And maybe use them for your daily blog, as the links provided below include a video. tragically, these animals, on the verge of extinction, in two instances, were shot by the police...bastards.

Indeed we do. I wish that the media would stop trying to claim that these blue dogs have anything to do with the chupacabra. We have been studying them for some years, and it is certain that they are coyotes of some description. Either coyotes with some strange skin condition, or coyotes in the very earliest stages of speciation..

Following on from the ongoing debate about the blue dogs of Texas, and whether they are suffering with mange, or whether they are something genuinely interesting, one of our Missouri reps, Lanette Baker writes:

This is Bello, the first picture was taken before we bathed him and the second was after we bathed him. He has generalized demodectic mange & secondary staph infection, the staph is normal with a bad mange case due to the scratching causing the secondary infection. It is often the staph which causes the thickening of the skin.

If you notice when looking at Bello his back legs seem longer than his front legs, this is just due to his build which is perfectly normal and is more pronounced in breeds that are more of a natural predator, such as coyote and wolf, then also other breeds of dogs, wolf hounds and grey hounds.

What is bad is that dog is the personal dog of someone who has a "rescue"

Publish all you want, I am working to get the lady who has the dog put out of business....

It is with great pleasure that we welcome Neil Arnold to the CFZ bloggo. I have known Neil for fifteen years now since he was a schoolboy with ambitions for adventure and I was an earnest young hippie who merely wanted to start a club for people interested in unknown animals. Nothing much has changed over the years. We are just both a tad older...

Being the CFZ Representative for Greater London (as well as Kent) is a great excuse to swing by the fashion boutiques and swanky bars of the capital. Of course, it also entails seeking new information of monsters and other strange creatures that the city has harboured.

One such tale, which I’d like to share with readers, is that pertaining to Mr Davy, a London naturalist who in 1878, worked at the London Aquarium. Imagine the horror on the faces of the locals, however, when Mr Davy paraded his new ‘pet’, a strange monstrosity which emitted horrible screeching noises. The ‘animal’, which Mr Davy casually took a stroll with, attracted the attention of many who described the abomination as reaching two-feet in length, and standing two-feet at the shoulder. At the time, it claimed that no anatomist could identify the beast, for its body was covered in wiry hairs, and although its head and tail resembled that of a boar, it seemed bereft of an abdomen, its back legs seemingly situated right behind its forelegs!

Such was the appeal, through its hideous features no doubt, of this creature, that crowds flocked to view it. Mr Davy seemed completely unaware that his pet had caused such a fuss, but when the crowds buzzed about him, he made a swift exit, running, with beast in tow, into the bowels of the London Underground.

The unintentional exhibit was described as a ‘living cube’ by those two felt fortunate to see it, although many were repelled by its ghastly form. Mr Davy decided that to elude pursuers he would have to travel on the Underground, in a secret compartment to avoid passengers fleeing for their lives, whilst others in their morbid curiosity would have surely flocked to the animal, causing great consternation on the railway tracks.

According to legend, Mr Davy told an acquaintance that he’d observed the creature whilst in the south of France. Local peasants owned the beast, which Mr Davy purchased from them, but because of the language differences he learned nothing about the creature. When a friend at the Aquarium looked at the beast, he could only surmise that it had been some weird dog-boar hybrid.

Mr Davy’s pet stopped traffic, and jammed streets. His own landlord did not find such a beast as riveting as the passers by, and cowered in his room, afraid of the unimaginable creature. On October 5th 1878, Land and Water magazine editor, Mr Frank Buckland, could only describe the animal as a “demon”, a satanic manifestation with the characteristics of a gargoyle. Naturalist Thomas Wilmington, wrote, in the following issue that the beast must be some kind of deformed hyena and that the idea of a hybrid was, “…utterly untenable”.

And there the legend ends, no-one knows what became of Mr Davy’s demon, or as to why peasants in southern France had obtained such a beast, although if we go back a century to 1764 to the former province of Gevaudan, in south-central France, then we are met by a legend more savage, but resembling a hyena, which slaughtered many innocent townsfolk.

Had Mr Davy simply purchased an unknown species and paraded it about town? Maybe his pet was nothing more than a freak of nature, sold to him by locals keen to earn a crust? Or was the strange tale simply a hoax, manifested by journals eager to please and intrigue their readers with fanciful frights and eerie anomalies?

It is a great privelige to be part of the Nature Blog Network and it is great fun to be able to pootle around the blogs seeing what 's new. First up (not surprisingly) is our old mate Darren Naish (who incidentally was the guy who first recommended the Nature Blog Network to us)...

In the light of the recently discovered Titaniboa it behoves us to take a look at some other monster serpents.

Stupidly large snakes - the story so far:

It has always been rumoured that some snakes grow to sizes that exceed the 10 m record which is generally accepted as the authenticated maximum; this was for a reticulated python (Python reticulatus) shot on Sulawesi in 1912. Numerous stories and anecdotes discuss reticulated pythons and anacondas (Eunectes murinus) that far exceed this, with the most famous of these stories being Major Percy Fawcett's 19 m long anaconda that he claimed to have shot in the Brazilian Rio Abuna in 1907. Despite its immense length, Fawcett reported that this snake had a width of just 30 cm (which makes the tale rather unbelievable), and he even discussed trails in the swamps that 'support the statements of Indians and rubber pickers that the anaconda sometimes reaches an incredible size, altogether dwarfing that shot by me' (Heuvelmans 1995, p. 340). Despite these many stories, no-one has yet produced a snake that exceeds 10 m in total length (though I hope that if such a specimen is ever found, it is not killed, but is restrained or captured or something.. and yes I do know that this is somewhat less easy than it sounds).

Perhaps less well known than these accounts of modern-day giants, however, are rumours and reports of fossil snake bones that have been estimated by some workers to have belonged to truly gargantuan reptiles... Read more

Giant Killer Lungfish? A couple of weeks ago both Jon and Karl blogged on the subject of cryptozoological lungfisheds. But here is another one. Minhocoes - the burrowing monster of South America, was it a huge lungfish? Zoologist Brian Switek investigates.

A December 1847 issue of the newspaper The Friend relayed the report of L.A. da Silva e Souza that the lake Padre Aranda in Brazil was home to creatures called minhocoes that "dwell in the deepest part of the lake, and have often drawn horses and horned cattle under the water." The creatures were also reported to inhabit Lake Feia, and the local people said they were giant worms that "cause[d] animals to disappear by seizing them by the belly."Read on...

As regular readers willknow, Richard is one of my dearest friends, and furthermore someone I have known since 1970 when we were children together in Hong Kong. He is a natural polymath, and one of the best researchers I have ever met. Proof of this particular pudding comes in these two stories which he fished out of his local public library..

I found the following two stories in the Macclesfield Courierand Stockport Express or Cheshire General Advertiser.(MCSE or CGA)

1."Wild Man- A wildman was lately caught in the forests of Hungary,bya Wallachian, who first perceived him seated upon a tree, eatingleaves. He appeared to be 24 years of age,and had his back and chestentirely overspread with a thick covering of hair: his skin was a darkyellow. He expressed only confused cries and a sort of murmer. Hebecame melancholy at the sight of a forest or a garden and sought tohide himself in such places. After having been kept 2 or 3 years incaptivity,he began to eat dressed meat,and from that moment his mannersbecame less savage; and his body losing a considerable portion of itshairy covering,became less yellow. He is now quite civilized,andperforms the office of water-carrier;but never advances so far as to beable to speak words and sentences in succession. MCSE or CGA March 23rd1811.

2. An eagle of an immense size,was shot lately at Heaton Norris nearStockport by Mr Geo.Bromiley of Gorton,which measured from tip to tipof the wings 7 feet ten inches,in length 3 feet 4 inches,and weighednearly 18 pounds. This mighty monarch of the air was fired at when inthe very act of attacking a young pig,and being only slightly woundedin the shoulder and back part of the head great pains were taken toseure him alive,but from the very stout resistance he made,it becamenecessary to kill him to prevent his escaping. He is now in the museumof Mr Priestnall, surgeon, in Stockport, and is supposed to be thelargest Bird of the kind ever shot in England. MCSE or CGA March 30th1811

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